The Big Bang has an Echo … Echo … echo

The Big Bang has an echo, which is what you would expect from a “bang” that, blew creation into existence.

The elusive echo has finally been located in gravitational waves. The waves, which Albert Einstein first predicted in his General Theory of Relativity, were discovered with the use of a telescope at the South Pole.

What this means, among other things, is that the universe had a beginning, and that beginning was 13.7 billion years ago.

For a long time, scientists made the (at least to me) totally illogical assumption that the universe had no beginning. It just, according to them, always was. Even as a young child, I thought this thinking was daft.

It turns out that my young child intuition was, at least in this one instance, more accurate than the thinking of the big brains of earlier eras.

I think one reason why so many learned folk made this assumption was simply that the idea of a universe which had a beginning raised all sorts of questions that their world view didn’t allow.

That’s not science. It’s human nature, and every single one of us, including scientists, is a slave to human nature. We don’t see what we don’t want to see. Unless, of course, we have to.

The “have to” in this instance was the doppler effect, writ large. Just as a train whistle changes tone as it travels past us, so the light from stars changes color as it moves away. This simple bit of logic led to the realization that the universe, which had once been thought static, was moving away from us. It was expanding at great speed.

Computations based on this movement led us backwards to a point where the expansion began: The Big Bang.

The universe that always was became the universe that had a dramatic and sudden beginning. Existence exploded into existence.

Scientists have advanced all sorts of theories to try to explain away the implications of this Big Bang. Some of them have been quite fanciful.

But this discovery leaves those ideas flat. These gravitational waves are an echo of the Big Bang in much the same way that a tsunami is an echo of an earthquake.

The Big Bang happened. It is where everything, everywhere, came from.

The rest is religion.